The Moscow Sleepers

by Stella Rimington

  Cicero gestured towards a large oak door opposite his desk and said, ‘Mr Sarnat is ready for you now. Please go through.’ He spoke in an English so flat and accentless that Liz concluded he must be foreign. She smiled at him but he didn’t smile back, and as she went to open the door, he sat down again, eyes intent on his monitor.

  Mr Sarnat had chosen the room that had probably been the dining room of the manor house a century before. It was long and comparatively narrow with tall sash windows looking out towards the courtyard at the back of the house. In the centre of the ceiling was a beautiful plaster rose from which hung a dusty crystal chandelier. Wide polished oak floorboards were scattered with Persian rugs, and two antique side tables held a pair of Chinese lamps. The Head’s desk was centred against the far end of the room, its back to a wall-wide spread of white cornice-topped bookshelves. Unlike his assistant, Mr Sarnat came out quickly from behind his desk, smiling to greet her and shake hands. ‘Mrs Forester, how good to meet you. Please do take a seat.’

  Liz sat down in front of the desk while Mr Sarnat resumed his seat. ‘I hope you have enjoyed your tour of our premises,’ he said. ‘Miss Girling has been here for many years, longer than any of us, and she knows the place inside out.’ His lips hinted at the faintest of smiles. ‘As you may have noticed, she is also rather old school.’

  ‘Yes, but she seemed very proud of your new IT block.’

  ‘Did she now? I am glad to hear it.’ His English was perfectly inflected but again Liz suspected he was not a native speaker; she wondered if he and Cicero were products of the same language school – though he could not have looked more different from his assistant. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with blond hair combed to one side. He had regular features, with a straight long nose and dull blue eyes capped by the palest set of eyelashes Liz had ever seen on a man his age – she estimated he was in his early forties. He wore an expensive well-cut suit, and a yellow silk tie with a cream-coloured shirt. He could have passed for an international businessman, prosperous and perhaps a little complacent. There was none of the slightly harried look one usually found in a schoolmaster.

  ‘I’d like to hear a little about your boy. George, isn’t it?’ he said, looking down at some papers on the desk in front of him. Slowly interlocking his hands, he sat back in his leather chair.

  Liz gave him the account of her non-existent stepson George that she and Peggy had devised. She explained that they lived in Geneva where her husband worked, but that both she and her husband were English and intending to return in the next year or so. They wanted George, who was just sixteen, to finish his schooling back at home and go to a British university. George was being taught well at the school he attended in Geneva (Liz could have supplied its name if pressed) but he was a highly intelligent child whose interests weren’t altogether catered for by the rather old-fashioned curriculum obligatory in that country’s cantons.

  ‘What interests are those?’ Sarnat asked with mild interest. Liz still could not place his accent; he might have been Dutch or German or even Scandinavian with his blond Aryan looks.

  ‘George is very keen on computers,’ Liz said, and for the first time there was real interest in Sarnat’s eyes. ‘He learned programming at a very early age – “coding”, I think it’s called. Other boys seem to like football, but George has never enjoyed sport – he’s always much preferred sitting in front of a screen.’

  ‘How interesting,’ said Sarnat, and he sounded as if he meant it. He leaned forward in his chair. ‘Do you know what languages he likes to code in?’

  Liz opened her hands, palms out, Italian-style. ‘I haven’t a clue about these things, I’m afraid. George likes to say I don’t know Coffee from JAVA, if that means anything to you.’

  ‘It does, actually,’ said Sarnat with a brief smile. ‘You’ve seen our new IT centre. I think your son might use it very profitably. We do have an exam for the students we take from abroad, but from the sound of it young George would pass with flying colours. Most of it is computer-related.’

  ‘Really? I’d have thought you’d be mainly concerned that their English was up to scratch.’

  ‘Not necessarily. You see,’ he said airily, ‘the world these days is more and more interconnected through technology rather than spoken or written language. People like to say the international lingua franca is English, but I’d say it’s digital.’

  ‘So some of your students don’t know English at all?’ Liz did her best to sound surprised rather than inquisitive.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far, and since we want them to feel at home here, we do offer remedial classes for those who don’t have much English when they arrive.’

  ‘Where do most of them come from?’

  ‘All over the world,’ Sarnat said, then perhaps sensing Liz would not be satisfied with such a vague reply he added, ‘We try our best not to classify our students in any way. That’s why we are most reluctant even to describe their nationalities. The world here at Bartholomew is seen as one nation, one people, linked by one sense of self.’

  ‘Goodness, you make it sound almost like a religion. I didn’t see a chapel on my tour,’ she added with a little laugh.

  ‘There is no chapel, nor any religion; we discourage our students from attending any kind of organised services. The faith we want them to have instead is in themselves, and in the common purpose we as their teachers try to inculcate.’

  ‘I see,’ said Liz, but she didn’t really. It sounded remarkably airy-fairy for a school Head hoping to impress a prospective parent. But maybe he didn’t want to impress her.

  There was a knock. Turning, Liz saw Cicero in the doorway. Sarnat stood up, ‘If you’ll excuse me for a moment.’

  He left the room and Liz sat still for a minute or so until, hearing two sets of footsteps leaving the anteroom, she stood up. Taking a step closer to the desk, she studied the titles of the books that sat on the shelves. There was some history, some biography, a complete set of Shakespeare and, at the end of one shelf at Liz’s eye level, several books on, of all things, Confucianism. Curious, she stepped around the side of the desk, reading their titles with an ear cocked for Sarnat’s return. Confucius: A Personal History, Confucianism in Taiwan, Taiwan and the Confucius Synthesis.

  What was the fascination with Confucius? she wondered. And with Taiwan? Taiwan had a superb technical education system, she knew – she’d remembered that at one point in the not so distant past Silicon Valley had been full of Taiwanese hardware and software engineers.

  As she scanned the books, she noticed a gap in the tightly packed shelves, presumably where a book had been taken out and not returned. Something glinted in the opening. Moving a neighbouring book, Liz took a closer look. She saw a metal protuberance, shaped like a tennis ball, attached to the back of the bookshelf. At the front of the ‘tennis ball’ there was a little glass eye, and when Liz looked more closely the eye opened and shut, then opened again. She could detect a very faint whirring sound.

  Hearing footsteps in the corridor, she quickly put the book back and returned to her chair. Moments later, Sarnat came back in. Their exchanges now became entirely conventional and focused on the usual topics discussed by parents and a prospective school – term dates, tuition fees, and the application form Sarnat took from his desk drawer.

  But when they had finished their business and said their goodbyes and Liz got into her car again, she was cursing herself. She had fallen for the oldest trick in the book – leave someone alone in a room and watch what they do. There was something very strange about this place. To find CCTV or its equivalent in a school wasn’t odd in itself but to put a hidden camera in the headmaster’s room, focused on the visitors’ chair, and then to leave them alone so you could watch what they did was not only unusual, it spoke of a suspicion and distrust that were positively sinister. What was the school trying to hide?

  22

  The Crown and Greyhound was an ancient coaching inn on the outskirts of Diss on the road
from Bury St Edmunds. In recent years it had been cleverly converted into a gastropub without sacrificing any of the old-fashioned charm of its cosy public bar or losing any of its traditional patrons. As Liz walked in through the bar the sight and sound of the locals – gamekeepers and farm workers in boots and overalls, with well-behaved dogs lying on the floor beside them – reminded her how far she was from Pimlico. At the back, behind the bar, a new annexe had been built for a dining room, and there she found Chief Constable Pearson, sitting at a table for two near the inglenook fireplace, where one of the season’s first fires was blazing.

  He stood up as he saw Liz approach. Pearson was a tall, lean figure with blond hair that was going slightly grey at the edges and striking green eyes.

  ‘Liz,’ he said with a big smile.

  ‘Hello, Richard.’ They kissed cheeks and Liz sat down, suddenly feeling rather shy.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you. Not our usual sort of meeting place,’ he said, waving a hand at the surroundings.

  ‘No. But it’s good to get out into the countryside for a change. Remind myself that it’s all still here.’

  ‘I feel the same,’ he replied. ‘And how were our mysterious friends at the college? I can’t wait to hear all about it.’

  She described her visit, making him laugh with her account of Miss Girling and the rather grim Cicero. But when it came to Sarnat and the man’s odd mix of technophilia and weird philosophising, Pearson frowned.

  ‘The oddest thing of all,’ she said, dropping her voice, ‘was that I discovered there was a camera hidden in the bookcase in the headmaster’s study, with the lens trained on the visitor’s chair. They left me on my own for a little, while Sarnat went off to do something. I think it was deliberate – to see what I did. I didn’t think. I suppose I was lulled into carelessness, assuming it was just an odd kind of school. So I got up and looked at the books and found the camera. I’m sure they photographed me snooping.’

  ‘That sounds extraordinary,’ Pearson said. ‘I made a few inquiries, and you’re right to think the man’s not your average schoolmaster. Most of the college governors have resigned since he came in – they weren’t forced out, but they no longer had any say in the running of the place. Initially, the new Head made a great show of consulting them but then he seems to have just forged ahead regardless. As you say, he’s changed the whole thrust of the institution: he’s concentrating on foreign students with a total focus on IT.’

  ‘But who owns the place now?’

  ‘The ownership’s not clear. It used to belong to a local family, but when Sarnat took over as Head and some of the governors complained about his behaviour, they got short shrift from the family – they didn’t want to hear it. Either the family’s given Sarnat their approval or they’ve sold the place and don’t want to admit it – or possibly they’ve signed some sort of confidentiality agreement. Perhaps they’ve sold it to Sarnat himself.’

  ‘We need to try and find out more about him. I couldn’t make out his nationality – Dutch possibly, or German. But it was impossible to tell for sure.’

  Pearson glanced at Liz. ‘Can I ask what he’s doing that you’re interested in?’

  Liz looked around the room. There was no one in earshot, but when she spoke it was in low tones that Pearson had to lean forward to hear. ‘You can ask, but I can’t give you a very coherent answer. Not because it’s confidential; it’s just that we don’t know.

  ‘We uncovered something similar in the States, where someone was sent in to train young people in aspects of computing, probably some form of hacking or cyber disruption or even espionage. We just don’t know. But the man doing it there died, so the whole thing seems to have aborted before we could be sure what it was all about. We’ve had some information since then suggesting the same manoeuvre might be under way in other countries, including the UK. The name of Bartholomew Manor College came up in what seemed to be the same context but without any more detail.’

  ‘This isn’t being done by the Dutch or Germans, surely?’

  ‘No. More likely the usual suspects.’ She looked at him and he nodded to show he understood. ‘But anyway,’ she said, her voice back to normal, ‘thanks for the info. It gives me a very good idea where to look next.’

  They’d ordered their dinner by now and while they ate, Liz asked Pearson about his new role.

  ‘I’m the lead Chief Constable for coastal security,’ he explained. It seemed the East Anglian coast on the North Sea was proving particularly vulnerable to a range of intruders. ‘In this part of the country we’re getting everything you can imagine,’ he went on. ‘The Kent coast is the easiest to reach from Europe – Calais to Dover is what, fourteen miles? – but it’s heavily policed and it’s a relatively small body of water. Plus there’s so much shipping in the area that it’s dangerous for small craft to cross that way – especially since they keep their lights out.

  ‘But the stretch of coast from Harwich to Cromer in Norfolk is about a hundred miles long, with lots of beaches, all deserted at night and some of them miles from anywhere. Boats can come in from any number of places: Dunkirk all the way up to Denmark. Border Force is doing what it can with the resources it has and so are the police forces all round the coast. But we need a more coherent strategy. It’s my job to work with our immediate continental neighbours as well as our agencies and come up with something better than we have now. So you can see why I said I was busy.’ His voice trailed off as he contemplated his task.

  ‘Is most of the traffic refugees?’

  ‘A lot of it is, poor sods. People who’ve managed to escape the violence in their homelands, risked their lives crossing the Med and travelled across half of Europe, only to end up drowned in the North Sea or getting dumped on some lonely East Anglian beach with not a clue about what to do next. If they actually get this far, they’re the lucky ones.’

  ‘Do you ever catch the smugglers?’

  ‘Occasionally. But it’s haphazard. That’s why I’m trying to improve collaboration and resources. Then, of course, there are the drugs and the weapons. They come in this way, too. Still, I don’t mean to moan. It’s a job really worth doing if I can make an improvement.’

  ‘Are you glad you’ve moved south then?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Yes, I am. It’s been a big change for me, with plenty of adjustments, but I am sure it was the right move.’

  ‘I have to say I was a bit surprised. You’d done so well in Manchester, after all.’

  ‘I think I was starting to feel I needed a change. New challenges and all that.’ He paused before adding softly, ‘And no ghosts.’

  Liz nodded. They had both lost partners, and shared an understanding of what each other had gone through.

  ‘I do go back north now and then. To see my brother-in-law and my wife’s parents – they’re still hanging on,’ he said fondly. ‘But what about you? Have you ever wanted to make a change?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Liz. There had been moments when she had wanted to up sticks and go somewhere new and start a completely different kind of life. Especially after Martin had been killed in Paris; for a while she had thought very seriously of chucking in her job and just travelling the world. Eventually she had concluded that she would just be running away from her grief, when she knew that inevitably it would follow her wherever she went.

  She said, ‘I have moved into a new flat,’ and grinned at the absurdity of claiming this for a life-changing event.

  Pearson smiled sympathetically. ‘That’s not nothing. Moving house was the worst part of it for me. I couldn’t believe how much stuff I had accumulated over the years. It took me a month to sort the wheat from the chaff. Even then a lot of chaff came south in the removal van.’

  *

  Outside the sky was cloudless and full of stars. Pearson walked Liz to her car, where she turned to say goodbye. They went to exchange a kiss on the cheek but got slightly out of synch and ended up kissing on the lips instead. Pearson drew back.
‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Liz said with a smile.

  ‘Is it?’ He was smiling too. ‘Then maybe I should do it on purpose this time.’ And he kissed her again, very tenderly. Putting his hands gently on her shoulders he looked her in the eye. ‘It’s very good to see you again, Liz Carlyle.’

  ‘Likewise, Chief Constable.’

  ‘I’ll be coming to London the week after next for a few days. Any chance of a repeat performance?’

  ‘The dinner or the kiss?’

  ‘Both, if you’re willing.’

  ‘We’ll have to see about that,’ she said teasingly. ‘Why don’t you ring me tomorrow with your dates?’

  They said goodnight for real this time, and Liz got into her car and drove off, waving to Pearson as he unlocked his saloon. She realised it was going to be quite late by the time she reached Pimlico and that she had an early start the next day.

  But it didn’t matter one whit, for she felt happier than she had in a long time. So happy, in fact, that she drove in a mild sort of daze. When she reached the roundabout where her road joined the A11 she had to wait in a short queue to let a line of lorries go through. It was only chance that made her glance in her mirror and notice that two cars behind her there was a blue Mini waiting in the queue.

  It was the same model she had seen that morning at Bartholomew Manor, with a man at the wheel. As his car inched forward he was highlighted by a streetlamp. He looked the spitting image of Cicero, Mr Sarnat’s glowering assistant. If the car behind her hadn’t honked impatiently for Liz to join the roundabout, she would have been able to take another look and make sure.

  23

  Bruno Mackay had firm views about parties, particularly the ones he gave himself. Simple entertaining was usually better than complicated efforts that could easily go wrong, but he also knew better than to cut corners. If you were going to offer food and drink it should be special food and drink – particularly on occasions like this when he was out to make an impact.